ArticleGenome biology2022
Gene flow and introgression are pervasive forces shaping the evolution of bacterial species.
Article in Genome biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Life in sediments fosters 'sexual' speciation in the Shewanella baltica complex.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- Description ofInternational journal of systematic and evolutionary microbiology · 2026Article
- Recurrent introgression and geographical stratification shape Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the Neotropics.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Hybridization breaks species barriers in long-term coevolution of a cyanobacterial population.eLife · 2025Article
- Introgression impacts the evolution of bacteria, but species borders are rarely fuzzy.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Rapid Radiations Outweigh Reticulations During the Evolution of a 750-Million-Year-Old Lineage of Cyanobacteria.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Reassessing taxonomy and virulence in themBio · 2025Article
- Hybridization breaks species barriers in long-term coevolution of a cyanobacterial population.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Squirrel: Reconstructing Semi-directed Phylogenetic Level-1 Networks from Four-Leaved Networks or Sequence Alignments.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Genomic divergence across the tree of life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Exploration of the genetic landscape of bacterial dsDNA viruses reveals an ANI gap amid extensive mosaicism.mSystems · 2025Article
- Homologous recombination shapes the architecture and evolution of bacterial genomes.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Relating ecological diversity to genetic discontinuity across bacterial species.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Quantifying Metagenomic Strain Associations from Microbiomes with Anpan.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Distinguishing among evolutionary and ecological processes shaping microbiome dynamics.The ISME journal · 2025Review
- Picoplankton nitrogen guilds in the tropical and subtropical oceans: From the surface to the deep.PloS one · 2025Article
- Co-evolution and Gene Transfers Drive Speciation Patterns in Host-Associated Bacteria.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Homologous Recombination Shapes the Architecture and Evolution of Bacterial Genomes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Evolution of homologous recombination rates across bacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Inter-species gene flow drives ongoing evolution of Streptococcus pyogenes and Streptococcus dysgalactiae subsp. equisimilis.Nature communications · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAlthough originally thought to evolve clonally, studies have revealed that most bacteria exchange DNA. However, it remains unclear to what extent gene flow shapes the evolution of bacterial genomes and maintains the cohesion of species.
resultsHere, we analyze the patterns of gene flow within and between >2600 bacterial species. Our results show that fewer than 10% of bacterial species are truly clonal, indicating that purely asexual species are rare in nature. We further demonstrate that the taxonomic criterion of ~95% genome sequence identity routinely used to define bacterial species does not accurately represent a level of divergence that imposes an effective barrier to gene flow across bacterial species. Interruption of gene flow can occur at various sequence identities across lineages, generally from 90 to 98% genome identity. This likely explains why a ~95% genome sequence identity threshold has empirically been judged as a good approximation to define bacterial species. Our results support a universal mechanism where the availability of identical genomic DNA segments required to initiate homologous recombination is the primary determinant of gene flow and species boundaries in bacteria. We show that these barriers of gene flow remain porous since many distinct species maintain some level of gene flow, similar to introgression in sexual organisms.
conclusionsOverall, bacterial evolution and speciation are likely shaped by similar forces driving the evolution of sexual organisms. Our findings support a model where the interruption of gene flow-although not necessarily the initial cause of speciation-leads to the establishment of permanent and irreversible species borders.
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